ThomasBowman's page

I just had in interesting idea. What if we converted the D20 Modern core classes to Starfinder, in the same vein as is discussed about the Pathfinder Legacy classes? After all D20 is related to D&D 3rd Edition which is in turn related to Pathfinder, and Starfinder is somewhat Pathfinder compatible, so it wouldn't be too much trouble to convert d20 Modern classes to Starfinder. Let me review the Core Classes from D20 Modern

The Strong Hero
The Fast Hero
The Tough Hero
The Smart Hero
The Dedicated Hero
The Charismatic Hero

Now guess what their key ability scores are going to be?
Strength
Dexterity
Constitution
Intelligence
Wisdom
and Charisma
in that order

First order of business is to convert the D20 Modern class skills into Starfinder skills.

The next order of business would be to level the equipment in the D20 Modern Core rulebook. Easy enough each item has a purchase DC, so the level of each piece of equipment should be proportional to the Purchase DC.

The idea is to have the D20 Modern World, our world basically encounter the Starfinder Galaxy, and Modern characters can then pass through a portal (ala Stargate) and travel to the Starfinder Galaxy. I think we can ditch the Defense adjustments per level, since their is already leveled Armor in Starfinder.

What do you think?

What would happen if the Third Imperium found a wormhole leading to the Starfinder Galaxy, specifically on the outskirts of the Pact Worlds system?

I noticed there is not a large selection of vehicles in the Core Rulebook, they are mostly ground vehicles. I noticed this when I was designing an encounter with legacy elves, they are encountered in a forest full of trees that are 1000 feet high! (This is due to the 1/6 Lunar gravity) Because these elves live in the trees, they need flying vehicles, and the selection of vehicles includes a lot of ground vehicles: Goblin Junkcycle, Basic Enercycle, Exploration buggy, Urban cruiser, Police Cruiser, All terrain vehicle. The water vehicles are Torpedo Minisub, Pump-Jet Sub, and Hover pod, but nothing that flies. The terrain of the forest is difficult to navigate, the elves being nature oriented, might not want a vehicle that tramples the forest floor and all the obstables ground vehicles might get stuck in, bogs, roots, shrubs and the like, it would be so much better to fly above that stuff. So we need a range of flying vehicles. Fortunately I got an old Traveller T20 Book with just the sort of vehicles I need, I just need to convert them over to Starfinder.

Here is a list of vehicles from the T20 book that would serve the need:
Primitive Biplane SI 50 AC 11 Spd 200 kph cost cr 11,840
Cargo Plane SI 75 AC 10 Spd 600 kph cost cr 363,760
Cargo jet SI 75 AC 10 Spd 1100 kph cost cr 1,594,000
Helicopter SI 60 AC 11 Spd 250 kph cost cr 82,760
Air/Raft SI 63 AC 10 Spd 120 kph cost cr 273,300
Pressurized Air/Raft SI 68 AC 10 Spd 120 kph cr 372,720
GCarrier SI 75 AC 10 Spd 120 kph cr 502,880
Speeder SI 68 AC 10 1100 kph cost cr 3,946,000
Grav Belt SI 5 AC 10 120 kph cr 9,232
All these vehicles allow one to fly, and I've taken them from my T20 Traveller book, so the stats in that book might be the easiest to convert to another D20 game such as Starfinder.

SI stands for structural integrity, that is the vehicle' hit points
AC is the armor class of the vehicle, the same system as is used in Pathfinder and Starfinder, the higher armor class is better
Speed is in Kilometers per hour (kpH)
Cost is in Traveller credits (cr)

Now can we convert these to Starfinder? It would be great if we had a selection of flying vehicles.

Let me start out this discussion with this image.
The moon on the left is the terraformed Moon, the one on the right is our Moon as we see it in the sky. The Moon elves in question live on the terraformed Moon to the left. In my campaign a magical event that occurred during the Gap tore our Solar System apart and reconstituted it. For the Earth memory was lost for one decade and when history began again, it was discovered the Earth was in a new Solar System with four stars, and one of the features of this Solar System is that every planet was terraformed except the Earth of course because it did not need terraforming. Each planet has the god it was named after living on its surface or underground or in the ocean as the case may be. I've detailed two worlds, Earth and Venus, and now I'm working on the Moon. Earth and Venus are primarily inhabited by humans. Venus humans are a little different physically from Earth humans, they are more primitive and live on a world full of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts, but that's another story. When I got to Earth's Moon, I had to decide who lives there. The Greek goddess associated with the Moon is Artemis, she is a hunter lives in a forest etc, that sounds like the sort of deity elves might worship. So Our Moon is inhabited by elves, okay fine and dandy, but Earth and Venus aren't that much different once Venus is terraformed, aside from little details such as Venus spins backwards and their are dinosaurs, but Venusian humans grew up under a similar gravity to Earth Humans, and so Venusians are slightly taller a little weaker, but that's about it.

Now what would elves look like if they lived on a terraformed Moon for say, 30,000 years? Now during the Gap, the Earth experienced 10 years of missing elapsed time The Moon however experienced 30,000 years due to its magical terraforming. The Moon actually terraformed rather quickly but elves had lived on its surface subjectively for 30,000 years, forests have grown and its ecology has stabilized, and suddenly at the end of the Gap, these elves find themselves looking up in their sky at Earth.

Now among some of the interesting things about this Moon is that trees in a forest can grow to a height of one thousand feet up to a maximum of 1800 feet for the tallest trees. To give you an idea of how tall that is, this is approximately as tall as the Empire State Building, 1000 feet is equivalent to 100 floors of an office building, and the Moon has whole forest with trees this tall, because the Moon's one sixth gravity allows trees to grow this tall.

Now what would a Moon elf look like? Because the Moon has one sixth gravity, a Moon elf can grow quite a bit taller than a human. An elf that is 12 feet tall for instance can lift 4 times the weight of a human that is 6 feet tall but would weigh 8 times as much, but on the Moon the Elf would weigh only 8/6th as much as a 6 foot tall human on Earth assuming all proportions are the same, so how tall could an elf get? if an elf was 18 feet tall and proportioned the same as a human, he would be 9 times as strong as a human but weigh 27 times as much on earth but 81/6th as much on the Moon. this is 4.5 times as much.

This moon elf is light on her feet, she only weighs half as much relative to her strength as does a human. If she jumps, whereas a human on Earth could jump 2 feet into the air, a Moon elf could jump 4 of her feet, which would be 12 feet into the air for a normal human. This moon elf is as tall as a cloud giant, but she doesn't have the powers of one, she is just a three times big elf. Other than that, she is the equivalent to a wild elf. There are tribes of such elves roaming the lunar forests when Earth people land on its surface. Moon elves have neutral tendencies, they hunt with three times big bows large animals that roam the forests. Do you think there will be any problems with the humans exploring their world?

Its a funny thing, but in a galaxy full of stars, instead of creating our own setting, we could just create a star system instead and stick it into the Starfinder Galaxy and outline how it interacts with the Pact finder worlds and other official materials.

Episode IV: A New Hope
If we restricted the characters to the closest Starfinder classes that their character concepts come closest to, how would that affect the story? Assume the setting is otherwise the same, same planets same Star Wars Galaxy, but in place of the Jedi and the Sith and other Force users we have magic and the three classes Mystic, Solarian, and Technomancer. Which character classes come the closest to Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, just as a fun exercise in our imagination? I think both Luke and Darth have abilities that more closely match the Mystic Spell list Mystics have telekinetic abilities among their spell lists and that is what Force users typically use as well as their mind powers. So lets say Obi Wan Kenobi was a Mystic hermit living out on the desert under the twin suns of Tatooine. Lets start with the opening scene after the credits We have this Star Destroyer chasing down this smaller ship a Corellian Corvette the Tantive IV. The Star Destroyer disables she ship's power plant, two droids R2D2 and C3PO escape in an escape pod. These two characters are mechanicals, they are called "droids" but I think under the Starfinder definition, it would be more accurate to call them robots rather than Androids. C3PO comes closest to being an Android, but he is obviously made of metal. There is the question of what level Mystic to make Darth Vader, mostly he has telepathic and telekinetic abilities and he is good with a light saber? Darth Vader would have a lot more magical abilities if he were a Mystic than he had as merely a Sith Lord presumably he is a rather high level character otherwise he wouldn't be a Sith Lord, and he has been around for Three prior Episodes, so I will assume he is at the top of his game, just a bit lower in level than the Emperor himself. He tries to interrogate Leia and finds out that the plans to the Death Star is in a droid. Darth promptly sends his storm troopers down to the surface to look for it. the Jawas pick up the droids and sell them Beru and Lars Owen. For some reason the Stormtroopers are slow to pick up the trail even with Darth's magical assistance.

This is my Scout/Courier from Traveller converted to Starfinder. I had the Air/raft bay converted into a tech workshop, as I didn't see any vehicle comparable to a Traveller Air/Raft in the Core Rules equipment list. Although the plans include a turret, I had to use a Shuttle chassis because the physical dimensions of the Traveller Scout/Courier fall under the Shuttle category, and shuttles have their weapons pointed forward, so basically the pilot is also the gunner, he has to air the starship and fire. It is a tier 1 starship, has crew quarters for four crewmembers, The drone section I replaced with escape pods. As for fuel, the core rules doesn't specify fuel, so I'm going with the Traveller assumption that this ship runs on hydrogen and has fuel intakes and a fuel processor so it can skim gas giants of hydrogen to power its fusion reactor or power core. Unlike the original Scout/Courier, this one has shields Its speed is 8 hexes.

The ship can operate for 2-weeks on a full tank of fuel, it also can obtain fuel from other sources, it has a hose for pumping water into its fuel processors which them crack it into hydrogen and oxygen, the fuel processors then cool and liquefy the hydrogen so it can be kept in insulated storage tanks.

An optional story, is that this ship originally came from the Third Imperium, an Imperial scout was investigating a special anomaly and was transported to the Starfinder Galaxy. The ship's Jump Drive did not function in this setting, the pilot could not get back to his home universe, so he used his thrusts to travel to the nearest inhabited system, which turned out to be the Pact World's System, He landed his ship on one of the landing bays of the Absalom station and contacted the authorities, and had it retrofitted with a Drift Drive.

So what do you think?

What if, during the Gap, someone decided to colonize a distant star, but lacking an interstellar drive, he decides to construct a Sleeper Ship, it turns out that it would take centuries for a starship to cross the void of space, so he decides to turn all the passengers and crew to stone to be turned back into flesh upon arrival by an android that casts the spell again to reverse the petrification.

Now it turns out that turning people to stone and then turning them back into flesh at the end of the journey would be a lot cheaper and simpler than freezing them and keeping them alive throughout the journey. There is just one little hitch that they didn't plan on, when everyone lost his memory and all records of the last 300 years were erased at the end of the Gap, the Android's knowledge of the flesh to stone spell was lost too, it was a recent memory, so now the android can't turn the passengers and crew back into flesh. The starship is quite large and its heading towards a populated planet, and its not slowing down!

What is to be done about this? The starship is, by the way, huge it was built at a time before there was artificial gravity so it rotates slowly to simulate gravity, it has a breathable atmosphere and a power source that has kept on running, there are trees, flora and fauna on the inside of this cylindrical spaceship, but all the intelligent creatures were turned to stone, and the animals are kept in ecological balance so they don't use up the resources of the spaceship, that is to say they are part of the food chain. The robots and androids have went a little nuts since having their memories erased by the Gap, some of them could be a threat to PCs trying to board the starship.

The starship is 20 miles long and 4 miles wide and it rotates once every 90 seconds for a full gravity on its inner surface, it weighs over a billion tons, and if it hits a planet, it has the potential to kill millions of inhabitants and to kick up a cloud of dust which could trigger a new ice age!

How does this sound as an idea for an adventure?

What do you think would happen to the passengers and crew when they are turned back into flesh?

This is the Venus of classic pulp fiction, very similar to Castrovel in many respects, it is a jungle/swamp world where it rains an awful lot, it has overcast skies most of the time over most places, the exceptions being very high mountain tops. days are very hot, often in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Humidity tends to he high, the air is filled with all kinds of insects. This Venus differs from the Venus of our Solar System in several respects, it rotates faster, it has a magnetic field such that magnetic compasses point south, and it rotates backwards such that the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east, it has a large moon, that is actually the planet Mercury, creating tides that are stronger than on Earth. The moonlight filters through the overcast sky, and occasionally this moon is even seen through a break in the sky, the disk of Mercury appears white and featureless as it has nearly 100% cloud cover just like Venus. The Sun appears as a diffuse glow in the sky, and occasionally shines with painful brightness through a break in the clouds, although this rarely happens.

Allosaurus is my first entry of legacy creatures converted for Starfinder using the rules in the core rulebook. I have ten dinosaurs I intend to detail, they will be included in encounter tables. Venus has the following terrain types by the way: Warm Forest, Warm Swamp, fresh water surface, fresh water depths (including rivers, lakes, and streams. Ocean surface, Ocean depths, clear, scrub, barren, hills, mountains. Venus has no deserts, it has glaciers only on its highest mountains near the poles.

This chart of Solar System A shows the stats of Venus and neighboring planets and Earth's Moon.
To summarize, Venus has an axial tilt of 2.6 degrees, thus very little in the way of seasonal variation, it is hard to tell what time of year it is from the surface because one can rarely see a clear sky. Venus' year is nevertheless 322.5 days long, not that it makes much difference. The most important time periods for Venusians is the day and the month. The Venusian year is divided up into ten months each one of roughly 32 days, ad sometimes of 33 days. There is a leap year for every other year.

This is an idea I've had. Starfinder versions of the planets or our Solar System. This is not our Solar System however, for one thing it has three stars and not one. Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, and Mars get one star. I can squeeze them all within the life zone of one star, the star I modeled this after is Alpha Centauri A, it is of the same type G2 V, but it is 50% brighter, thus its life zone is further out and wider.
This one shows the stats for the Original Solar System and on the right, the modifications I've made for a science fantasy campaign:
Solar System A
Mercury has been made the Moon of Venus, both are habitable. Venus is a jungle/swamp planet with two main races, humans and lizardfolk, it is also a world of dinosaurs, it is a very primitive world, it is also a very wet world, it rains 50% of the time over its entire surface, the sky is overcast around 90% of the time, occasionally there is a break in the sky and a little patch of blue sky appears, sometimes the Sun peaks through. The goddess Aphrodite is in charge of this planet, she is a part of its "life support system" keeping it cloudy enough to reflect most of the sunlight back into space, at night she lets they skies get clearer, the stars and Mercury become visible. In this Solar System, Mercury has an atmosphere, from Venus it appears mostly covered with clouds, it is the home of halflings, gnomes, and other races with tendencies towards theft, Hermes, the one in charge of that Moon is the god of Thieves among other things, its inhabitants tend to reflect his nature among other things.

Earth is almost our Earth, like other places, it has suffered the effects of the Gap, the other planets in this system have not, they have separate histories going back thousands of years. But this Earth had 300 years of records and memories erased, the last records which were not erased right before the period of the Gap was of the year 2018. The political boundaries are the same of that year, but the people are not, they had lives and memories of the last 300 years erased, they don't know what countries they belong to, but they adopt the country that the preGap records indicate they are living in. There is evidence that the planet may have been united under a single world government, but no records of it, so they go ith the last records they had available. Unlike other places in the Galaxy, this Gap just ended, and people are now dealing with the consequences. There are people who can cast spells that don't know where their learned magic, all the records indicate there was no magic before the gap, and the other planets looked different, that is they didn't have life on them. The stars in the night sky were different as well, the star charts dating from just before the gap and the stars they now see in the sky don't match. There are spaceship and other futuristic devices and vehicles and the people of Earth know how to operate and maintain them, but they just can't remember how they learned this knowledge. The clocks on their computers indicate that its the 24th century, but have no records of what occurred during the 300 year gap in history.

Mars is a mostly desert world with a Northern ocean, and a number of crisscrossing canals built by someone, the inhabitants call them the Ancents, some believe they were gods, a lot of it is superstition, this is my dumping ground for most of the creatures from the Alien Archive, There are androids, strange alien creatures, and humans of course. Elves make this planet their home and so do orcs. The god in charge of this planet is of course Ares, the God of War, he likes conflict after all.

The second star in this system has Jupiter in its minisystem. Jupiter is a giant planet, and its gravitational field prevents other planets from having stable orbits, so there is just Jupiter and its Moons here.
Solar System B
Jupiter is a huge planet! I have made it larger here so it would have just 1 gravity on its surface. Jupiter is a world of clouds and tall mountains poking through them, the mountain tops and the upper clouds are the only places that are habitable here, a person falling too far gets cooked and crushed by the thickening atmosphere, thus living creatures need to maintain altitude through flight or live on the mountain tops poking through the clouds. Jupiter is also the home of cloud and storm giants, it is the realm of Zeus, king of the gods in this Solar System at least.

The third Star shines on Saturn
Solar System C
A planet that is similar to Jupiter but smaller and colder, it is the home of Frost giants and other cold loving creatures, Kronos, the god in charge of this place is a bitter old man, he is also known to some as "Father Time" various Time Elementals have been known to make their appearances in the clouds of this world.